1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to computer software and, more particularly, to web services.
2. Description of Related Art
The “Internet” is a worldwide network of computers Today, the Internet is made up of more than 65 million computers in more than 100 countries covering commercial, academic and government endeavors. Originally developed for the U.S. military, the Internet became widely used for academic and commercial research. Users had access to unpublished data and journals on a huge variety of subjects. Today, the Internet has become commercialized into a worldwide information highway, providing information on every subject known to humankind.
The Internet's surge in growth in the latter half of the 1990s was twofold. As the major online services (AOL, CompuServe, etc.) connected to the Internet for e-mail exchange, the Internet began to function as a central gateway. A member of one service could finally send mail to a member of another. The Internet glued the world together for electronic mail, and today, the Internet mail protocol is the world standard.
Secondly, with the advent of graphics-based Web browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, and soon after, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the World Wide Web took off. The Web became easily available to users with PCs and Macs rather than only scientists and hackers at UNIX workstations. Delphi was the first proprietary online service to offer Web access, and all the rest followed. At the same time, new Internet service providers rose out of the woodwork to offer access to individuals and companies. As a result, the Web has grown exponentially providing an information exchange of unprecedented proportion. The Web has also become “the” storehouse for drivers, updates and demos that are downloaded via the browser.
Many services on the Internet involve the transfer of sensitive information that needs to remain private. For example, financial transactions, bank accounts, credit card information, and the like, as well as company or government secret documents, may need to be transferred across the Internet, but should be transferred in such a way as to prevent unauthorized access. Thus, businesses and other enterprises who have a need to expose or exchange sensitive information to their partners are always challenged with the way information is transmitted. As mentioned above, there are various expensive schemes that customers can choose (e.g., Secure ftp, ftp (encrypted files), or use a secure tunnel) to ensure privacy in exposing or exchanging the sensitive information. However, all of these solutions come with an additional cost, moreover these solutions rely heavily on the same type of product at the partners receiving end. Currently, there are no tools available that run on any operating system that offer an RC2, DES, or Triple DES web service that does encryption/decryption of the posted files, where the posted files may be in any format. Furthermore, secure File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is often slow and most tools either offer Secure Socket Layer (SSL) based or Secure Shell (SSH) based FTP, but not a combination of both, thus allowing the files that in transit to be susceptible to hacks. Encryption/Decryption of files prior to transfer involves procurement of expensive encryption/decryption infrastructure both for the sender and receiver. In addition, there is always the problem of integrating the file encryption process with the certificate authority process. Also, if FTP is used to transfer the files, the user identification (ID) and password in clear view with FTP, and, thus, security is compromised. Therefore, it would be desirable to have a web service that does not require the partners in an exchange of information to have the same type of product on both, that encrypts/decrypts files in any format, and that incorporates encryption/decryption and digital certificates.